Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Destination: Greenland -- Polar Bears Pass Through Town

from Larry Lunt: April 27,09

This morning was our last in Qaanaaq. During breakfast at our guest house, our host fed us one last polar bear story.

This year they have seen a record number of polar bears passing through the edge of town -- 10 sightings over the past six weeks, when it started getting light out after the long, dark Arctic winter. The reason is that the open sea is gradually moving closer to the village as the sea ice melts.

The good news for us is that it is not a dangerous time of the year for polar bear attacks. They only attack people when they are really hungry, which is only in the fall, as the winter darkness draws nearer and it becomes harder to catch seals. Even then they’re really only a risk when they haven’t eaten enough during previous months. (Polar bears need to start off the winter with a full stomach.)

At this time of the year, the females are with their babies and tend to run away from people. Males are busy looking for females and occasionally kill the babies out of jealousy. It’s also prime-time seal-hunting season -- April, May, June -- so they’re not very interested in us. They are not familiar with our smell and apparently are not attracted by our meat.

With these reassuring words, we depart on our skis pulling our 100-pound sled, which we call Moby Dick as it looks like a whale moving slowly, quietly, heavily. (I’ll send photos later.) Since we are traveling away from the open sea toward the end of the fjord, we won’t have many run-ins with bears. That means we will have to wait for when we reach the other side of the peninsula in a week for our next polar bear photo op. Just in case, we carry a gun (a Magnum 44) in the very rare case where we encounter a curious one. We don’t intend to shoot the bear. Our plan is to shoot in the air, which typically scares them away.

Enough about bears. Our first big day on skis is over now. The weather was beautiful: sunny, very little wind, temperature around zero degrees Fahrenheit (That’s about -18 degrees Celsius, and yes, that’s good weather here!). We skiied across the flat sea ice to Bowdoin Fjord, where we set up camp. Nine hours, 27 kilometers. It was a perfect day.

Saturday, April 25, 2009

Destination: Greenland -- A Village Relocated

by Larry Lunt April 22, 2009: Last night we ate a curious looking steak. After we finished, I was told that it was whale! That explains the fishy taste of it.

This morning we flew to Qaanaaq--a four hour flight with a stop to refuel in a 12-seat propeller plane (a Dash 7) that makes the flight once every week. We finally arrived at our destination--the northernmost community on planet. Here in Qaanaaq, 600 Inuits live permanently in near-complete isolation... [full report at: http://www.onearth.org/node/1081 ]

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Some did. In 1958, the National Academy of Sciences published a booklet titled “Planet Earth: The Mystery with 100,000 Clues,” which contained this prescient paragraph:

Our industrial civilization has been pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a great rate. By the year 2000 we will have added 70 percent more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. If it remained, it would have a marked warming effect on the earth’s climate, but most of it would probably be absorbed by the oceans. Conceivably, however, it could cause significant melting of the great icecaps and raise sea levels in time.http://www.extremeicesurvey.org/index.php/glaciology/

Sunday, April 5, 2009

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - One Antarctic ice shelf has quickly vanished, another is disappearing and glaciers are melting faster than anyone thought due to climate change, U.S. and British government researchers reported on Friday.

They said the Wordie Ice Shelf, which had been disintegrating since the 1960s, is gone and the northern part of the Larsen Ice Shelf no longer exists. More than 3,200 square miles (8,300 square km) have broken off from the Larsen shelf since 1986.

Climate change is to blame, according to the report from the U.S. Geological Survey and the British Antarctic Survey, available at pubs.usgs.gov/imap/2600/B.

About Me

Luc is and adventurer, author, and member of the Explorers Club. Graduated from Centrale Paris, he is president of Sagax, a US-based investment and management advisory firm.
He has pursued a personal goal of traveling extensively across the globe, frequently with family; photographing and reporting from remote places to raise awareness for global causes. Luc is also Vice-President of Green Cross France et Territoires, the environmental NGO founded by Mikhail Gorbachev.